JEREMY LONG: ESSAY FOR HIS CATALOG 2006

I wrote the essay from seeing the painting in both positives and negatives. I never saw the thing in the flesh. I did not realize that it was painted from a photo, and then, later, when I realized it was, I also realized that he had conquered the photo, and painted it with pictorial smarts which came from his daily practice as a painter from the motif. This was written before I started the blog, and I only just realized it should be up on it.

Figurative painting in the 20^th century and thus far in this twenty-first century has not been the major trend. Aside from artists who left figuration for cubist, expressionist and surrealist distortion, there was very little in the 20^th century that made the grade. The Balthus show at the MOMA in 1956, together with his concurrent one-man show at Pierre Matisse, which featured his recently finished painting “the Room” was the big event for New York City, while I was young. This first exhibition of Jeremy Long with its assured landscapes, cityscapes and large, complex and original figure paintings is the closest thing to the First exhibition of Balthus in 1934 I have ever seen. Unlike some first shows, it does not seem as though the artist has any apprenticeship ahead of him. He arrives in full mastery of his medium with a very wide expressive range. His seriousness does not preclude puns and jokes. These often are at the height of artistic intelligence. The landscape with the negative shape of a heart is an artist’s valentine. But it is painted with an interest in surface tension, which is a post abstract artist’s concern as well as an homage to his love.  What does post abstract mean? Nowadays some figurative painters show in their work an extremely sophisticated knowledge and love of abstract painting, and abstract construction and an awareness of metaphor. Abstract painting in the 20^th century has been not only an adventure in non-representational forms, but also an adventure in metaphoric construction. Paul Klee, one of the most important artists of the period is a perfect example of this. Concerns involving the reality or unreality of images; paintings, in which representation questions representation, come naturally to Mr. Long. His figure compositions are serious studies in which each figure questions the reality of the others. He never paints as a virtuoso realist without concerns about the reality and validity of his images. This puts his paintings on an altogether different level of accomplishment than merely serious show of skilled work which shows the artist struggling with the problems of “good” representation only. These representations engage the mind, the eye and the heart in bold new ways because they challenge each other’s reality and even the space in which the viewer stands.

The landscapes, although profoundly involved in the preimpressionist worlds of Constable, Courbet, Corot and the Barbizon school also show awareness of the tensions between representation and abstraction. The power of the picture plane and the internal abstract surfaces and planes recall abstraction and make his work post-abstract figurative paintings in the very best sense.